DB Advanced Dungeon Generator Questions

[SgtHulka]

First of all, really well-done. Things that particularly impress me about this game are:
1) The Random Encounter Turn Tracker. A very interesting concept.
2) The Advanced Monster Flow Charts. With the addition of just a tiny bit of common sense the enemies are quite dangerous.
3) The opponents stat blocks. Holy cr@p. A LOT of work went into these. I didn't expect anything like this when I bought the download. Class level monsters for every APL? Are you freaking kidding me? And each is optimized for the Advanced Monster Flow Charts, ready to consume valuable treasure like healing and bull's strength potions. Awesome, awesome job here.
4) The awareness and surprise rules.

All of the above make for a pretty challenging game that doesn't feel nearly as "random" as I expected it to.

Now for my question both for the designer and other players. How do you guys feel about the Advanced Dungeon Generator? Personally, I'm finding that it doesn't have enough doors. My first Advanced Dungeon began with a dead-end corridor and no doors, for example, resulting essentially in a winless quest.

Yet maybe this lack of doors was an intentional design decision? The Advanced Dungeon Builder is a bit more challenging than the basic one due to the fact that the dungeons end up WAY bigger and the characters are wandering a lot. When playing the basic dungeon the Random Encounter Turn tracker never came anywhere close to 8; now it's regularly hovering above 4, and the fact that the characters haven't even found a single large room is definitely adding urgency to their moves. Part of this is a direct result of a lack of doors...few doors mean few rooms of any type and therefore fewer large rooms and a longer quest before finding the quest room. I like that.

Any suggestions on a compromise? My current compromise is to re-roll the 12-sided die when it comes up 1-4. That way there's always *some* feature to a corridor, and it's more likely a door will appear. But I'm still not finding many doors.

[Skarn Rapajya]

Originally Posted by SgtHulka

Now for my question both for the designer and other players. How do you guys feel about the Advanced Dungeon Generator? Personally, I'm finding that it doesn't have enough doors. My first Advanced Dungeon began with a dead-end corridor and no doors, for example, resulting essentially in a winless quest.

::SNIP::

Any suggestions on a compromise? My current compromise is to re-roll the 12-sided die when it comes up 1-4. That way there's always *some* feature to a corridor, and it's more likely a door will appear.

I like the advanced tables, but I often wind up not using them. I play solo, and I don't have much space to spread out, so I use AutoREALM as my gaming table. It becomes VERY cumbersome to add all of the little features as I go while using mapping software.

The trade off is effort vs. detail. When I'm solo, the hack & slash fix overrides my love of fluff and detail.

As for no doors, I've had this problem even with the BASIC dungeon tables, rolling that dead end corridor to start with. My house rule is that there's ALWAYS a secret door in that initial dead end. If the room I roll up on the other side has no further doors, then its the quest room and I have a quick adventure.

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Another option would be to rule the dead end as an empty cave you mistook for the real dungeon and start over. Maybe the bad guys left false tracks that fooled your ranger just long enough to let the villains warn their minions and so the random encounter tracker starts at setting 4 instead of 1 in the real dungeon.

Once DB Wilderness comes out, maybe there's an ambush waiting outside this red herring. Roll as if in a side quest room (1d6-1 on the Quest Room Encounter Table) for the ambushers, then continue on to the real hideout.

[SgtHulka]

Originally Posted by Skarn Rapajya

Another option would be to rule the dead end as an empty cave you mistook for the real dungeon and start over. Maybe the bad guys left false tracks that fooled your ranger just long enough to let the villains warn their minions and so the random encounter tracker starts at setting 4 instead of 1 in the real dungeon.

That's a really good idea. Like you mentioned earlier, when the opening dead end came up, I just house ruled that there must be a secret door and continued on. But I like the false cave concept and will likely use that in the future.